Abstract
In 1936, William Butler Yeats famously excluded the Great War combatant poets from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. In the Introduction to that volume, he justified his decision as a matter of thematics and, more subtly, poetic fashion.
I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road—that is all.1
Ostensibly, the poet needs to remain an active force that cannot be overwhelmed by local conditions, even if these conditions involve industrial slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Additionally, just before the passage excerpted above, Yeats characterizes the war poems as having ‘for a time considerable fame’;2 the seemingly throw-away qualifier ‘for a time’ of course implies that whatever notoriety the war poets had achieved by the mid 1930s was a temporary anomaly. Their passivity was a fad; the Yeatsian active version of the egotistical sublime would soon return to its proper place of dominance.
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Notes
William Butler Yeats, Introduction, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892– 1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. v–xlii, pp. xxxiv–v.
William Butler Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 124.
Yeats characterizes the poets as ‘invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity’ (p. xxxiv), which excludes the work of enlisted men such as Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg; interestingly, Yeats turned down the chance to write an introduction to Rosenberg’s first collected volume in 1922; see Nicholas Murray, The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: British Poets of the First World War (London: Little, Brown: 2010), p. 204. Another enlisted man, David Jones, had not yet published his monumental In Parenthesis. Yeats anthologized none of Graves’ poetry and only one each of Rupert Brooke’s and Edward Thomas’s poems; he also choose Sassoon’s ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ (p. 259), which is a war poem but clearly a product of post-war reflection rather than the mid-war anger for which Sassoon is best known.
George Orwell, ‘W. B. Yeats’, My Country Right or Left: 1940–1943, vol. 2 of he Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: Godine, 2000), pp. 271–6, p. 271.
Francis Thompson, Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 89.
Jay Winter, ‘Beyond Glory: First World War Poetry and Cultural Memory’, The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 242–55 offers the idea that Yeats rejected Owen because Yeats read him from a non-British perspective. As Edna Longley points out, Yeats’ omission is not a result of a single reason but of ‘complex denials’
Edna Longley, ‘The Great War, History, and the English Lyric’, The Cambridge Companion to The Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 57–84, p. 76.
Owen created embarrassment for reasons of social class as well. Siegfried Sassoon told Stephen Spender that Owen ‘was embarrassing. He had a Grammar School accent’; see Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon, The Making of a War Poet: A Biography 1886–1918 (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 400. This was at a time, however, when Owen had more or less eclipsed Sassoon as the chosen poet of the war, especially among the Auden generation. Sassoon was obviously annoyed that Spender showed no interest in Sassoon’s own continued writing and wanted only to use him as a conduit to Owen
Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 350–1.
Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. xiv. Cited hereafter parenthetically in the text.
Lest this seem like a baseless accusation of Heaney, the essay in question turns from Owen to Osip Mandelstam, whom Heaney constructs as an immaculately aesthetic poet whose ‘purely artistic utterance’ (p. xx) put him in conflict with Stalinism. In Heaney’s Nobel lecture, he places Owen into his poetic genealogy as ‘a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century’s barbarism’; see Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 12.
Fran Brearton, ‘“But That is Not New”: Poetic Legacies of the First World War’, The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 229–41 usefully contrasts Heaney’s relationship to Owen with that of Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, whose imagination, Brearton argues, is much more ‘haunted’ by the Great War than is Heaney’s (pp. 237–8).
More recent scholarship has offered defenses of Owen’s aesthetics, what Jahan Ramazani calls his ‘overwrought rhetoric’ and ‘verbal excess’; see Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 80.
Stuart Sillars, Structure and Disillusion in English Writing, 1910–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) opens his chapter on Owen (‘Wilfred Owen and the Subjugation of the Poetic’, pp. 62–92) by considering how ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ could have benefitted from a Poundian editor. He also describes Owen’s full rhymes (as opposed to pararhymes) as often ‘ponderously outlandish and contrived’ (p. 77). Sillars always gives credit, however, to Owen’s self-consciousness about his style: Sillars sees Owen as using poetry against itself in service to his ethical ideal.
Likewise, Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) sees Owen as actively indulging in bad taste as a rejection of a Kantian disinterest that had no applicability in the trenches. Owen is ‘both sincere and knowingly tasteless’ (p. 137) because ‘such intense excess insists against neutrality’ (p. 199). Howarth also offers an exemplary reading of Owen’s concept of pity (contrasted to Wilde’s), including but not limited to its sexual dimensions.
Tim Kendall, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) opens his chapter on Owen with an overview of other poets’ negative estimations of Owen’s poetic ability (pp. 46–51). These poets include Craig Raine and Donald Davie. Finally, Santanu Das’ virtuosic reading of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ calls attention to its ‘excessive music’, but also explains how this aesthetics of excess is integral to the poem’s meaning
Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 157.
As Dominic Hibberd demonstrates in his first two books on Owen, Owen’s younger brother Harold substituted a falsified citation for Owen’s Military Cross into the Collected Letters; Hibberd reproduces both versions of the citation in Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: The Last Year, 1917–1918 (London: Constable, 1992), p. 174. The version in the published letters claims that Owen captured a number of prisoners, while the official citation has him capturing an enemy machine gun and using it to inflict casualties on its former owners. Owen mentions his recommendation for the MC in a letter to Sassoon and tells only of ‘having taken a few machine guns (with the help of one seraphic lance corporal)’ (OCL, p. 582). It is unclear as to whether Harold Owen wished to spare his mother’s feelings or support the public image of his brother as a war-scarred pacifist, though both could well be the case.
Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Wilfred Owen’, The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 117–28 also stresses Owen’s relation to Keats.
Cited in James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 1; cited hereafter parenthetically in the text.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), p. 74.
Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), pp. 55, 60.
Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1980), originally published in 1965, reads ‘Greater Love’ as a rejection ‘both of women and of normal sexuality’ (p. 130).
Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, 1972 (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), in many ways the most important pre-Fussell text on First World War combatant poetry, generally reads Owen as a political poet of compassion (in other words, exactly that to which Yeats objected); Silkin sees fin-de-siècle, Swinburian eroticism, however, as a ‘contagion’ that infected Owen’s poetry (p. 234).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 287–8.
See James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History, 30 (1999), pp. 203–15.
Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) situates combat gnosticism in terms of her concept of ‘autopsy’, or first-hand experience of conditions being represented (pp. 42–3)
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) which stresses European cultural continuity in dealing with the pressures of the war and de-emphasizes the war’s role in the birth of a new and modern worldview.
See James Campbell, ‘Interpreting the War’, The Cambridge Companion to The Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 261–79
Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Simon Featherstone, ‘Colonial Poetry of the First World War’, The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 173–84.
See Richard Hibbit, ‘The Artist as Aesthete: The French Creation of Wilde’, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 65–79 for a description of Laurent’s defense (p. 77), as well as indication that many of Wilde’s French comrades renounced him in 1895. Emily Eells, ‘Naturalizing Oscar Wilde as an homme de lettres
French Reception of Dorian Gray and Salomé (1885–1922)’, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 80–95 points out, however, that though Laurent may have protested Wilde’s conviction and the conditions under which he was forced to serve his prison term, he nonetheless thought Wilde a derivative and unoriginal writer (p. 81).
Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) also makes this point in the context of Owen’s use of classical texts that are likewise not found in his surviving library; see pp. 119–21.
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) identifies ‘Shadwell Park Stairs in the Rotherhithe Tunnel’ (p. 49) as a site of relative privacy for male–male sexual liaisons in early twentieth-century London. The entire second chapter of Houlbrook’s Queer London illustrates the role of ‘public queer culture’ (p. 44) in the metropole in Owen’s time. Similarly, chapters 2 and 3
H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), provide an excellent overview of the relationship between metropolitan queer culture, the police, and public discourse that ‘simultaneously referred to homosexual desire, and tried to cover all traces of its existence with circumlocution and evasion’ (p. 78).
Neil Corcoran, ‘Wilfred Owen and the Poetry of War’, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 87–101 remarks on the simultaneity of the two strands but dismisses what I am calling the Wildean texts as ‘callow poems of unalloyed homoeroticism’ (p. 90).
Harry Ricketts, Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War (London: Chatto and Windus, 2010) represents the two strands as doing battle ‘for Owen’s poetic soul’ (pp. 144–5), which certainly implies their incompatibility.
William Wordsworth, VIII (‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Vol. 2, ed. E. de Selincourt, 5 vols (London: Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 34.
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Campbell, J. (2015). Priests of Keats: Wilfred Owen’s Pre-War Relationship to Wilde. In: Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen, and Male Desire. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137550644_6
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